Last week, actually on Tuesday, Fitness Tips for Life celebrated it’s 1 year anniversary as a blog. Originally when I came up with the idea of this blog it was supposed to just be 30 days of posts of what people could do to improve their health. I had a goal to help 100 people to improve their fitness and improve their lives. It looks like I have probably done that.

Some of you may have been reading before as I had a fitness hobby blog connected to my family domain but on September 16th, 2007 I moved to Wordpress as a blogging platform, got the new domain up and running and got serious about this blog.

The last year has been very eventful 272 new posts and 966 comments from others. That is a heck of a lot of information to read and learn from.

I have also had a lot of people signup for my newsletter and 21 day email fitness program. In fact 1244 people have signed up and gone through that course and receive tips and not very regular info from me by email.

The number of people that visit has steadily increased as well. over 2000 people a day are coming and checking out articles and learning more about fitness and what they can do about improving their health.

I have also added some fitness forums to the site and although they are getting busier I am hoping to start posting a lot more there so if you have not checked out those messageboards I would urge you to go there now and sign up so that you can interact with others that read the blog.

I want to thank everyone that has come by and read what I have to say over the last year. I want to thank all of the commenters that have said nice things and especially those commenters that have inspired others with words of knowledge and encouragement. This blog has a life of it’s own thanks to everyones interaction and is less about my input than it is about you who include yourself as a part of it.

Thanks

Thanks for visiting. To get started why not subscribe to the 21 day fitness plan at the top of this page. Look in the red box, it is right there.. Thanks Bill

Alltop is a directory of blogs and new sties. I have just been included in the Fitness section of Alltop and you can see my blog there at http://fitness.alltop.com

For those of you that have not visited the alltop directory what it constist of is a bunch of individual subjects and then in each subject the top blogs and news sites are listed along with the last 5 articles for that site. Check it out, I am in the bottom of the fitness list right now but am hoping to move up.

I put up a poll last week but many people seem to have missed it. The poll is in the sidebar and the question is:

What kind of articles do you want to see?

The options are:

• Exercise Articles
• Eating Articles
• Motivation Articles
• Personal Development Articles

Cast your vote so that I can start giving more of the content that you are looking for.

In this blog some things are date based and other items are just reference material. Tonight I was working a little on that reference meaterial part.

I have recently been able to obtain a bunch of articles that tell you how to do some common and not so common exercises and have posted them on the blog. Since there are a few exercises and it did not seem like something that would be relevenet for the front page of the blog I back dated the posts.

The exercises are good and have a lot of detail that will help you do them. Over time I am hoping to have a 100 or so exercises on here so that they make good reference material when you get vored with your weight workouts and would like to try different exercises.

To access these exercises you can go into the Exercises Archive. Click that link and you should get to it right away.

Have you ever sat down to something and next thing you look up and a couple of hours have gone by?

“Where did those hours go?” you ask?

Well I seem to be doing the same here on the blog. I had this brainstorm a few weeks ago that I wanted to make some changes to the Fitness Tips Blog and started looking around at different Wordpress (the engine that runs this thing) themes and started modding a few things and next thing I know I have stepped away from the blog and been a computer geek instead.

Sorry

Anyway, the reason that I stepped away in the first place is that I realize that there are limitations to the  format that I have been writing to you with over the last three years. I have written nearly 1000 posts and trying to get through all of that is difficult. One of the things that I use to reduce the difficulty to readers is by using categories. That is great but a little cumbersome as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I have today started a fitness forum that I had planned earlier this year but never setup I was inspired by Ken, who emailed me this morning with the following.

Hi Bill just wondering how often you get to answer peoples queries on your website as I see you haven’t been able to for a while now. It’s just that I think it would make a great difference to the new starters like myself to see that there is some support available, however I have been helping a few others with my comments as I do believe that this diet really works so is there any way you could perhaps introduce a forum for all of us, it would be a great help if you have the time of course! Cheers, Ken Rowlands.

Ken of course is referring to the Fat Loss for Idiots review that has gained a life of it’s own over the last few months. People are commenting by asking questions, giving answers, sharing successes and just plain asking a lot of questions. A forum is a much better place for this conversation to happen than in blog commenting.

So the fitness forum is ready for primetime, I think, but I am going to be popping in and out of there a lot over the next couple of days as Bill and Billyboy. If you have any questions you can either comment here or just email me. Also the number of forums is a bit small so let me know what forums are missing, what you want to see and talk about. This is not a forum for me, that would be the blog, the forum is for you to post and talk about.

I look forward to seeing everyone that visits here in the forum and I will answer all of the questions that I can while at the same time look forward to lots of open conversation, much of it I hope by me!

The registering ofr the forum is easy enough. Create a username, password and type in one of those codes (I tried to make it easy to recognize) and youo can go ahead and say what you want on anything to do with health and fitness.

I am very excited. The weather has gone good again and here I am in Calgary with temperatures around 25 Celcius today, thats in the 80s for those of you south of Canada.

This morning was my first ride in of the year in a T-shirt with no jacket on. It feels like a national holiday. I think I am going to take the long way home today and enjoy this nice day after a long cold winter.

Hopefully this weather inspires me to post a little more, my pace has slowed these last couple of weeks.

Last week I did a poll asking who you thought would be the best person to bring back for the Biggest Loser finale. The decision on the blog was that Mark should come back over Roger by 58% to 42%. Of course we all know now that they actually brought back Roger.

This week I thought i would do a poll on weight loss and gain. I have been working on this blog for a few years now and either I am more interested in losing fat or gaining muscle and the posts reflect that. So the question this week is:

Are you more interested in losing fat or more interested in gaining muscle.

Of course in the name of fitness these are both two sides of the same fitness coin. It helps you get healthier to gain muscle and that in turn helps you lose fat but I really want to know what you want to read articles on.

Vote today and I will use the results as a reflection of the articles that I will be writing.

I have decided to start something that is a little different just as an experiment. I will keep posting here but also will add lots of other links through a twitter account so that anyone using Twitter can get even more value without my regular blog readers being buried in article links from other blogs and news sites.

I have lots of ways to have people follow this blog. Just read it, follow through RSS, signing up for a newsletter, and now Twitter.

Twitter to me is like an instant messaging or SMS system that sends messages to no one in particular across the internet. The way that Twitter is used is that you sign up and then whenever you find a person who you want to see information from then you “follow” them on Twitter.

Following on Twitter is just a matter of going to the Twitter site or using a browser plugin to be alerted whenever one of your new friends posts a message, called tweets. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been away on vacation for the last few days. I went with my family on a vacation to Hawaii. We spent 7 days in Waikiki and the rest of the island of Oahu and I have a few stories that I am looking forward to telling about the weather and sunburns, about eating at restaurants, about exercise and workouts and also about people trying to have the best beach body.

I am still getting my bearings back since I have had to move back and forth across four timezones but I am less sleep deprived today then I was yesterday.

More articles this week. I am hoping to be a bit of a posting demon getting lots of tips up this next week.

Oh, and the Biggest Loser? I have missed two straight episodes so I will need to watch those and post about those as well.